The Future of Coffee
This blog is about the future of coffee but it's not about robots and coffee or AI and coffee or AI robots and coffee. Those are, at this point, a combination of current realities and future certainties. What isn’t a certainty is growing coffee like we do now in the places we do now in the future. Sorry about the clickbait photo.
The coffee industry is sticky. I and many of the people I work with inside and outside of Covoya Specialty Coffee measure their coffee careers in decades. For many of us, that wasn’t necessarily the plan. And we didn’t really get stuck so much as we just stayed. While it’s true that, at some point, experience becomes momentum and it’s difficult to change direction, most people who stay in coffee for decades will express something emotional around their reasons. The words “love” and “passion” are not uncommon. In fact, those of us who write about coffee try to avoid these words because they are cliches in specialty coffee. Cliches, but true, nevertheless.
My own reasons might sound a little more like thinking than feeling, but don’t let me fool you. I like to say I have stayed in coffee so long because it’s impossible to learn everything there is to know about coffee and because coffee attracts really interesting people. In other words, I love learning, I love writing about what I learn, and I love the people. Love love love love love.
Why am I writing about love and longevity in the coffee industry to introduce the topic of coffee’s future? Well, because coffee isn’t food.
We need food. We might also love food, but we need food and that need is a basic fact of being human. We love coffee, but, despite all of the memes and t-shirts and mugs that say otherwise, we don’t “need” coffee. Not really. Psychologically, emotionally, socially, we might need coffee, but it wasn’t that long ago that humans didn’t have coffee and today a fairly significant portion of the human species doesn’t drink coffee. No human goes without any food whatsoever for very long and lives to tell the tale.
One of the more uncomplicated reasons among all the complicated reasons that coffee agriculture hasn’t benefited from as much innovation research as food agriculture over the years is because we don’t “need need” coffee the same way we “need need” food.
The notion that a coffee farmer produces coffee the same way their great great grandfather did may seem romantic, but the reality of climate change makes it unsustainable. Setting aside climate change; while a coffee farm being in the same family for generations might be an appealing story, the absence of change due to a lack of research and resources was never romantic.
Fortunately, for more than 10 years now, World Coffee Research (WCR) has been writing a new story when it comes to agricultural innovation and coffee. If you’re not familiar with WCR (and even if you are), I have a suggestion. Go to worldcoffeeresearch.org and don’t read anything except the tabs at the top. Click “Resources” and then scroll through all their publications and read the titles. It will take some time as there are dozens of reports, posters, webinars and information sheets. I’m serious, read each title.
There is plenty of good information about what WCR does on their website, all of it worth your time. But to my mind, nothing conveys the true value of WCR’s work, and why we support that work at Covoya Specialty Coffee, like the outputs on their resource page. From very practical field guides for producers, like Good Practice Guide: Coffee Nursery Management, to high level research on macro-economics, as in the video presentation Is producing more coffee good or bad for farmers? Probably my favorite is the Sensory Lexicon which I wrote about in the blog Words About Words About Coffee.
Although the work WCR does is far-reaching and performed by staff all around the world, it falls generally into four areas of focus, as outlined by WCR.
Breeding 10–30 years to impact in farmer fields
“Today’s coffee varieties are no match for the threats of the 21st century, but breeding innovation severely lags other crops. We support our partners to apply modern breeding approaches to create better varieties that meet farmer and consumer demand.”
Field & Quality Trials 7–15 years to impact in farmer fields
“Farmers need varieties that perform better than what they already have. Through our international network of trials, we test both existing and new varieties in the field and in the cup, we support the creation and diffusion of better plants that meet farmers’ and roasters’ needs.”
Nurseries & Seed Value Chains 1–7 years to impact in farmer fields
“Creating the best variety in the world doesn’t matter if farmers can’t access it. But today, most farmers don’t know what varieties they have, and don’t have access to better. We work to make better plants available and accessible to farmers by strengthening seed systems, deploying new tools, purifying seed lots, and training nurseries.”
Global Leadership 1–3 years
“WCR drives a strategy to enhance the stability and quality of world production. Each year, we consolidate and elevate research on key topics and shared concerns of the global coffee industry.”
Covoya supports WCR along with more than 170 companies, from large to small, in 29 countries because we believe the future of coffee is truly at stake. As you can see by the outputs on the Resources page and the years associated with each area of focus above, WCR is focused on providing near-term value to the entire supply chain while, most critically, taking a long and methodic approach to solving the distant horizon for the coffee plants themselves as well as the coffee farmers.
Years ago, a friend of mine who had already measured his coffee career in decades when we met, used to say, "Sustainable coffee is the coffee we'll be drinking in 100 years." People would smile and nodd because it was clever and true and a little sad because we all knew that the coffee we might be drinking in 100 years is no coffee. Because of the real-world work done by WCR, I now think of my friend's definition for sustainable coffee as a statement of hope.
